But Beau’s service was personal and not political, and the president was all in that morning for my dad, my brother, and the rest of our family. I was nothing but appreciative.
The president opened by quoting the Irish poet Patrick Kavanagh: “ ‘A man is original when he speaks the truth that has always been known to all good men.’ ” Beau, he then said rightly, was an original, “A man who loved deeply, and was loved in return.”
He talked of the accident that took our mother and sister, and how it shaped Beau’s life—all of our lives.
“For Beau, a cruel twist of fate came early,” he said. “But Beau was a Biden. And he learned early the Biden family rule: if you have to ask for help, it’s too late. It meant you were never alone; you don’t even have to ask, because someone is always there for you when you need them.”
The president noted my dad’s tender yet purposeful reaction after that tragedy, how he carried on in public service (Mike Mansfield, longest-serving majority leader in the history of the Senate, convinced Dad not to resign the office during those days between the crash and taking the oath), how he eschewed “the parlor games of Washington” and instead commuted home to Wilmington every day to see us kids off to school and kiss us good night.
“As Joe himself confessed to me,” the president put in, “he did not just do this because the kids needed him. He did it because he needed those kids.”
President Obama followed that with a litany of Beau’s many accomplishments, calling him “a soldier who dodged glory,” a prosecutor “who defended the defenseless,” and that “rare politician who collected more fans than foes.”
He summed him up, to appreciative laughter: “He even looked and sounded like Joe, although I think Joe would be the first to acknowledge that Beau was an upgrade—Joe 2.0.”
“Beau was… someone who charmed you, and disarmed you, put you at ease,” the president continued, providing a lighthearted inventory into the essence of both the public and the private Beau. “When he’d have to attend a fancy fundraiser with people who took themselves way too seriously, he’d walk over to you and whisper something wildly inappropriate in your ear. The son of a senator, a major in the Army, the most popular elected official in Delaware—I’m sorry, Joe—but he was not above dancing in nothing but a sombrero and shorts at Thanksgiving if it would shake loose a laugh from the people he loved.
“And through it all, he was the consummate public servant, a notebook in his back pocket at all times so he could write down the problems of everyone he met and go back to the office and get them fixed.
“This was a man who, at the Democratic National Convention, didn’t spend all his time in the back rooms with donors or glad-handing,” he continued. “Instead, he rode the escalators in the arena with his son, up and down, up and down, again and again, knowing, just like Joe had learned, what ultimately mattered in life.”
The president paused a moment before he went on, as if anticipating the political sea change that loomed around the corner. “You know, anyone can make a name for themselves in this reality-TV age, especially in today’s politics. If you’re loud enough or controversial enough, you can get some attention. But to make that name mean something, to have it associated with dignity and integrity—that is rare.”
Near the end, the president borrowed another line from the same Irish poet he’d quoted at the start. This one encapsulated the sadness we all felt even as we smiled at Beau’s bright memories:
“ ‘And I said, let grief be a fallen leaf at the dawning of the day.’ ”
The president stepped down from the altar and walked over to Dad, who stood to accept a long, full embrace. The president then kissed my father on the side of his head—a gesture of the brotherhood he’d noted earlier—before finally letting go.
My sister followed the president. I accompanied her up to the altar and remained at her side, a show of sibling unity for Beau. She was funny and adoring and hopeful and poignant—the quintessential kid sister.
“When I was in first grade, I drew a picture of what made me happy,” said Ashley, who was ten years Beau’s junior. “And it was me holding hands with my two brothers.”
She made it clear that she saw the two of us almost as one, just as Beau and I did: two sides of the same coin.
“It’s impossible to talk about Beau without talking about Hunter,” she said. “They were inseparable and shared a love that was unconditional. Although Beau was a year and a day older, Hunter was the wind beneath Beau’s wings—Hunt gave him the courage and the confidence to fly… There wasn’t one decision where Hunter wasn’t consulted first, not one day that passed where they didn’t speak, and not one road traveled where they weren’t each other’s copilots.
“Hunter was Beau’s confidant,” she said. “His home.”
Ashley had quickly shared in our bond. As with any good sibling, we loved her and were annoyed by her in equal measure.
“It was true then and it remained true throughout my life—I feel like the luckiest kid sister to be raised and built by two extraordinary men,” she said. “Although, as my husband sometimes points out, they didn’t read all the directions.”
Ashley then noted the events that passed as milestones in a kid sister’s eyes, including the fact that Beau and I introduced her to her future husband, Howard, after we first met him at an Obama-Biden fundraiser in 2008.
Beau and
